I think you'll find there's a lot of 'lurkers' on these forums, like myself, comparing features and making decisions - many of those based on commercial motives.
For my part, I've been testing and watching for a few weeks, weighing up the strengths of Opencart with a number of other carts out there.
The agency I work for have an in-house system which I inherited and have pushed forward - but it's past it's prime. (no SEO URLS, too many hacked features, forked code base etc.)
... but collectively we have a massive amount of experience working with numerous clients for whom we maintain shops. We're not just dabbling with 'ma & pa' outfits.
We
could adopt Opencart and churn features back into the community, however, with employees and other bills to pay, we're still deciding.
After evaluating a number of systems, we've decided we may redevelop our own in-house bespoke solution from the ground up, if so, we intend to keep a close eye on Opencart, as there's an active community and ideas to be gained and ideas to share.
I'm fairly certain there's more than a little commercial motive behind opencart, despite the fact it's an open source offering - we all have to eat!
I made use of the contact form here to inquire about commercial support - but heard nothing back for over a week now - but hey, that shows there's very much of a commercial interest in opencart. It would be crazy to do it any other way, unless your a nutty hippy who is clueless about money!
... it's a confusing and competitive market - I've spent the last month researching what's out there - and as a company, are still debating which way to go with this.
I suspect re-building our own will win the day.
i2Paq wrote:peteVA wrote:I understand it's free. I understand it's open source. I also understand that many of the moderators have a vested interest in selling their own templates and commercial additions and modifications. More power to them, I've bought many mods for CubeCart over the years and appreciate them daily. My point here is that they benefit from OpenCart possibly more than Daniel, so why can't they manage something of the sort I mentioned above?
Speak for yourself
First: I have no commercial interest in OpenCart other than that I want this project to be a succes and hopefuly in the near future I can move my own shop to it.
Second: Everyone, commercial interest or not, will benefit from what we all can do to help Daniel to have a stabel release out to the rest of the community. That is why some of us are working with Daniel to get some changes in progress and with one of the first to be a beta-test project.
Let us not forget that the more OpenCart is known and used the more responsibility rests on the shoulders of Daniel to have every release to be as stable as can be. This means lesser questions about issues, easyer upgrade routes etc.
This can only happen if some changes are made and this is done by taking baby-steps to make sure it is done properly.
Dude why re-invent the wheel. If yours is past its sell by date, why would you revamp it when you could use OC as a base? Maybe you should stop being a lurker and get into OC if you can be of use. Who knows perhaps your mods etc would make money. OC is by far and away the best open source cart system out there and as far as I can see its better than most paid scripts too.
